


Déjà Vu

by Misanagi



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Angst, Child Abuse, Gen, Introspection, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 06:06:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misanagi/pseuds/Misanagi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony is seven years old but he learns fast. Dreams don’t last. </p>
<p>(A twist on a favorite trope. Tony gets de-aged but when he goes back to normal, child Tony goes back home.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Déjà Vu

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt at the AvengerKink](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19994.html?thread=47738650#t47738650).
> 
> Unbetaed. All mistakes are mine.

Tony wakes with a kick to the stomach. 

He grunts, curls in on himself and tries to think. 

“Get up!” Another kick. “You know you’re not allowed in here”.

He’s not. He knows that. He knows he’s on the floor of his father’s workshop but he also knows he wasn’t here. He was in Bruce’s lab. They were ready and he was going to—

“Are you deaf!” The kick makes him gasp and Tony’s body reacts even though his mind isn’t quite here, now.

As his father shoves him out of the workshop, he knows. 

He’s back.

* * *

Except he hasn’t really gone anywhere.

He wasn’t missing. Jarvis saw him at breakfast, just three hours ago. He’s not wearing the clothes Clint bought him. The colourful bandaid in his finger is gone. There isn’t a screwdriver in his pocket. 

When he curls up in bed that night he thinks that being back home might be a dream but when he wakes up the next day, still in the mansion, he knows it isn’t. 

Whatever then was, with all those people, _that_ was the dream. 

And it’s over. 

Tony is seven years old but he learns fast. Dreams don’t last.

* * *

They do, somehow, linger.

It’s an ache. He knows he’s alone and it’s somehow worst than before. He was used to being alone. It’s how life worked. Now he knows it really isn’t. It’s only how life works for Tony. 

He daydreams, and tries to remember. Sometimes it’s nice. 

Then one night, without thinking, he asks if he can have more soup at dinner. 

His father makes him fast for two days, sitting at all meals with his parents, looking at his empty plate. When his father catches Jarvis sneaking him some food, Tony gets locked in a closet for another day. 

He doesn’t see Jarvis again. 

Dreams, he learns, are dangerous.

* * *

There are more slip-ups, little things here and there, like laughing when his father is entertaining guests or absently voicing his opinion.

The worst one happens when, after some mishap or other, his father yells the same old words at him. “Even Captain America would think you’re worthless.”

And for the first time it isn’t shame or the crushing guilt that rises to the surface, but anger, and Tony is speaking before he can think of the words. “No. Steve said I was a hero!”

He doesn’t know if it’s true. He doesn’t really remember the dream very well but he thinks it is. “Steve wouldn’t like you.” And there’s a weight behind those words, as if it’s something Tony has finally come to believe. 

He spends three days in the hospital and walks with a limp for a month. By the end of it he has started to forget Steve’s name.

* * *

Back in boarding school he decides they were imaginary. The team ( _they had a name…_ ) were just an invention. Tony, who dreams of robots and rockets and cars decided that he needed to dream of something human, so he made them up.

There were no games or toys. No one sang him to sleep. There were no hugs or piggyback rides. There was no laughter and experiments. Tony can’t _just be Tony_. And it’s stupid to cry. 

Stark men are made of iron.

* * *

In a way boarding school is worse than being home.

That year he forgets it was just a dream and one day says something about talking houses and large green monsters, and suddenly he isn’t the nerdy boy everyone ignores but the weirdo everyone hates. 

The beatings aren’t that bad and he can ignore the teasing, but the practical jokes… he doesn’t want to think about that, or hope that she ( _Tash…_ ) would defend him. 

After the summer, when it’s time to go back to school, Tony runs away from the first time. He’s found in a couple of hours and brought back to his father. 

He starts school with his arm in a cast.

* * *

The next time he tries to run away he’s ten, and almost done with school.

If he thought it was bad when everyone thought he was crazy, it was worse when he was four years younger than his classmates and smarter than all of them. 

He hides in a nearby town for three days before someone recognizes him. 

His father doesn’t come. 

He spends most of that year hiding in the vents ( _“It’s not really a nest…”_ ) but he still has to come out to eat and go to class. 

One day, when he’s cornered by three of his classmates he decides to fight back. He looses, badly, and has to get stitches on his split lip. 

He keeps fighting back anyway.

* * *

His father packs him out to MIT with a credit card and a warning.

He’s fourteen and his father mostly ignores him.

Tony hates that he actually wishes his father would care enough to hit him again. 

He gets into fights. He gets drunk. He gets high. He gets arrested. He gets laid. He gets even more messed up, if possible. 

Then, he meets Rhodey.

* * *

Tony throws up on James Rhodes. More than once. He tries to hit him while drunk, yells a few profanities and then tries to kiss him.

Rhodey still stays. 

It’s weird having someone be there for him and it makes him ache with a desperate, almost forgotten longing. 

He clings to Rhodey, all the way knowing that, eventually, it will end. 

Friendships, or at least friendships for Tony Stark, can’t last.

* * *

Maybe it’s that nagging feeling, the knowledge that everything comes to an end, that drives him to build DUMM-E ( _laughter, a metal claw, reaching up, Dum…_ ).

It’s a week of caffein and building and mad coding but there he is. DUMM-E. Imperfectly perfect. Real. Not a dream. Here.

Here to stay.

* * *

He doesn’t know what to do with the news of his parents’ deaths.

His mother was a glass of gin and vacant, distracted, eyes. 

His father was disappointed. 

The only thing Tony really knows is that he failed.

* * *

It’s in those hazy (drinking, drinking too much) months that he starts to code, day in and day out.

He doesn’t leave his apartment and he’s desperate. He needs to do this, needs to fill a void, needs to grab on to something before he melts like his so long ago invented dream.

It’s eight months before J.A.R.V.I.S. comes online.

When he speaks for the first time, a bit of the nostalgia is gone and Tony can breathe again.

* * *

When Pepper comes along Tony is still a mess. He’s better than when Rhodey met him and much better than when he first started working on SI, but he’s still broken.

Pepper gives him a long look and Tony knows that she has seen inside him and knows that there’s no fixing the mess Tony Stark is. 

She tries anyway. 

It won’t work. When it ends, as it’ll inevitably will, it’ll end in tears.

* * *

Tony longs for broken after he comes back from Afganistan _shattered_.

* * *

Yinsen dies. Pepper almost dies. He kills Obie.

Dreams don’t last.

* * *

“I am Iron Man.”

He has this strange, half remembered feeling of someone, once, calling him a hero.

* * *

Of course, it doesn’t last.

Palladium poisoning won’t be a good way to go. 

He doesn’t tell Rhodey or Pepper, instead he plans quietly.

They deserve everything. 

After all, they stayed.

* * *

He meets Natalie Rushman and the ghost feeling of a kiss on his forehead and whispered foreign words, makes him trust her instantly.

Even later, when he’s stabbed with a needle and finds out her real name, that doesn’t change. 

And that trust, more than anything, terrifies him.

Tony Stark doesn’t do trust. Even less implicitly.

* * *

Pepper and Rhodey do leave, but it’s okay. Tony made them. And they came back anyway.

He saves the day and gets the girl. 

Still, he knows happily ever after doesn’t exists.

* * *

He goes back to New York (not the mansion, _never_ the mansion) and builds himself a tower. It’s strangely like coming home, as if he finally managed to rescue New York from the memories of his father.

That’s when Coulson comes with files and impending doom. 

Tony wishes he had it in him to be surprised.

* * *

It’s weird how going head to head with a Norse god doesn’t worry him a bit. Even when he’s hit with lightning and the actual hammer of Thor.

Tony jokes and hits back ( _”Higher! Higher!” The fast wind in his face, flying, a red cape, a grin…_ ) and battles the god of thunder with a smile on his face.

* * *

The moment he lays eyes on Bruce, he wants to hug him.

Tony Stark doesn’t really hug. It’s not something he has much experience with. Instead, he compliments Bruce, and his awesome alter ego. And then, when Bruce talks, Tony wants to hug him even more. 

He contains himself and offers a blubbery instead, but the feeling doesn’t go away.

* * *

Captain America hates him.

It hurts more than it should. As if he has been betrayed.

Tony doesn’t know this man, not really, no more than the character in the comics or his father’s tales. 

To prove this, he fights back, just like in school, not caring if he wins, not caring how hurt he gets. 

After all, he has always known Captain America would think him worthless.

* * *

As he flies Clint Barton to the roof of a building he thinks of piggyback rides and water gun fights.

He must have hit his head at some point.

Still, he keeps an eye on the archer. Somehow, Tony knows it’s just a matter of time before he falls from something hight.

* * *

Then he’s dying in space.

* * *

Later, though he still shivers with the cold and the oppressive silence of the portal, Shawarma feels like coming home.

A piece of something he doesn’t quite remember slides neatly into place.

* * *

They all scatter and go away and then one by one they all come back.

They were already the Avengers but now they become a team. 

Friends. 

Steve apologizes to him. 

Tony wishes he had the courage to do the same. 

Instead, he invites them all to move in. 

He’s honestly surprised when they agree.

* * *

Pepper does go away, or back to Malibu. 

They are not together anymore and Tony drinks for days.

He was right about his happily ever after, but even though Pepper goes away she doesn’t leave him. She calls, she cares. 

She’s still his friend and she’s still trying to fix him. 

But she had gotten too close. 

Tony understands. He doesn’t want to break her too.

* * *

Then, months later, when he’s back on his feet and can talk to Pepper without feeling the empty hole in his chest, Loki smirks at him during a battle and points his spear at him.

And as it hits him, Tony knows, it wasn’t a dream after all.

* * *

Seventeen days later he wakes up on his bed in Stark Tower, just as his seven year old self wakes up on the floor of his father’s workshop.

* * *

He remembers it all.

He remembers crying on Steve’s shoulder, Natasha singing to him, Bruce hugging him tightly, Thor taking him flying, Clint playing hide and seek with him on the vents, J.A.R.V.I.S’. constant, calming voice. 

He remembers them taking care of him, realizing his father hadn’t done a very good job of it, reassuring him, telling him he was a hero.

He remembers learning to trust them. Little by little opening up to them, allowing himself to laugh and play. Being a kid. 

Being happy.

He remembers loving them. 

And he remembers losing them.

* * *

He has always known dreams don’t last.

But, apparently, sometimes they come back. 

And sometimes, they come true.


End file.
